resurrection

Hypnotic suggestions from being mind controlled persist after the controller’s death, causing the victim to occasionally take actions to support the cause of a mind flayer cult that no longer exists.

Repeated demonic possession has left the patient with permanent gaps in their soul’s defenses, causing them to immediately get re-possessed if they go outside a consecrated area.

Post-resurrection trauma as the revived soul remembers an unpleasant afterlife.

Curse of bad luck - makes any small illness or injury potentially fatal if not treated with anti-curse in addition to anti-infection procedures

Magical reliance on a magical or nonmagical substance - can have any number of side effects

Repeatedly being drunk by vampires can cause an increase in blood production and therefore high blood pressure and related ailments. Can be treated by blood letting.

There’s a lot of hybridization happening in a lot of fantasy settings, and that’s just asking for a lot of people with weird half-dragon genetic disorders. Works out fine for some people, not so much for others.

Parasitized by (insert creature here). If you don’t take the correct precautions to keep it dormant it will continue to spread and eventually hatch out/transform you.

Repeated contact with the undead has left you open to their influence - leading to hearing or seeing things that other mortals can’t, which can distort or distract from more mundane concerns.

Alternately to being more vulnerable to intrusion, one’s soul can form a scar that makes helpful magic more difficult to take in.

Sleep disorders that make one fall into an impenetrable sleep at a specific trigger, or to do so for years at a time.

Out of phase with 4D space, one’s body not connected to itself or anchored in place/time in the usual way. There could be a consistent two hour gap between the things you hear and what has happened, you might clip into the floor as if it was in a different place for you, or you might slide through the material plane in cross section.

Intermittent intangibility.

Split into two people, each with only half your traits.

the forgotten dread: memory modification magic has caused the subject’s conscious mind to forget some past trauma, but their subconscious still remembers, causing them emotions that they cannot explain or justify ranging from mild discomfort to blind panic when presented with triggers related to the aforementioned trauma. often encountered in cases where the subject has paid an unscrupulous mage to make them forget their past as an ill-advised alternative to therapy.

Psychically Transmitted Memories: the subject’s mind has been linked to another person’s and, although the bond has since been severed, they have retained memories or thought patterns from the other person that are difficult to distinguish from their own.

Negative Life Syndrome (previously “False Life Syndrome”): seen most often in cases when the subject is exposed to dark magic while in the womb, Negative Life Syndrome leaves the subject’s life energies tainted by undeath without making them truly undead. common symptoms include intolerance of radiant magic, aversion to sunlight, and the inability to set foot on hallowed ground; rare symptoms include healing from negative energies, sudden necrosis, and the desire to eat flesh or drink blood of living beings.

lycanthropy

Awareness of too many dimensions makes it difficult to interact with just this one - either to keep track of conversations, or walk to specific locations without ending up on another planet instead

Telekinetic psychosis - delusions tend to physically affect those around you (but HIGH chance for ableism in this one!)

you have flare-ups where your skin tends to slough off and be replaced by some other substance

After sharing life energy with a dying loved one, you’re now both trying to survive off one person’s supply. Like chronic fatigue, but if your loved one gets too big of a bruise you won’t have the energy to get up until it heals

living in reverse

stuck at a certain age

supersenses lead to constant overstimulation

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33  (dev. Sandfall Interactive)

Some recent commissions for queer fantasy books I've had the pleasure to read❤️

death kiss

Family 🩸

From where i stand, the vast majority of analysis i see on verso operates on an inaccurate assumption that reframes his character as a whole.

This man did not sacrifice the city of lumiere to achieve his ends.

Verso is so relentlessly determined to pursue what he believes to be the greater good that he’s willing to go through with horrible things to realize it. It’s easy to look at what he’s been capable of doing to the people around him and write him off as someone who would wipe lumiere off the map. I’m not saying he’s a good person. But objectively? The deaths of all those people are not something he could have chosen to prevent at any point in time.

It seems like the prevailing take is that verso made the choice to end every life in lumiere to save his family and grant himself, both original and painted, the release of death. To me, this doesn’t follow the logical progression of the story.

The fate of lumiere was never verso’s to choose.

If you find verso’s journal, he states his dream for lumiere as of expedition 0 so plainly it hurts. We deserve to live. All of us. We deserve to exist. His plan was to free the paintress. Send his mother home, and keep lumiere alive. And we know that’s his truth, we know that journal represents as genuine a window into his mind as we ever get and the most sincerity the man can physically manage, because of how fucked he’d be if anyone but himself ever laid eyes on it.

And i doubt he just had some change of heart, decided all that wasn’t worth the effort. I don’t think he caved to a selfish desire to die either. Everything about this man, from his prior self’s sacrifice to his willingness to suffer for others to his gameplay mechanics (i’m looking at you, burden), scream to the player that he isn’t motivated by that kind of self interest. No. I think he just realized it was impossible.

He wanted to save lumiere, up until the last moment. Pleaded with aline to accept verso’s death and go home. But realistically, he’d already given up. He probably knew in his heart for decades that it was never going to work.

So that left him with two options, right?

Kill the paintress, save aline and let lumiere die…or forfeit and watch both die slowly. Because lumiere is still, fundamentally, a city caught between two mourning gods. And the only alternative to ending it in one stroke was letting the gommage continue to its ultimate conclusion.

It’s easy to say verso’s choice was cruel, but i genuinely feel the alternative is worse. Because what would monolith year 18 look like? Year 13? Year 9? I spent all of act one and two thinking about that, and i think the death that they had was kinder.

Verso was never even in a position to sacrifice the lives of an entire city to save his mother. No. From where he stood, there was no outcome where lumiere would survive. Renoir condemned the city to death. His mother was the only person he could save.

“But what about the letter?” Finding the courage to pursue a different path might have seemed like an option, for someone with the capacity to hope. But that’s not verso. Verso’s behavior paints a picture of a person who will commit unimaginable acts, do things that tear his own body and psyche to pieces and mar his own soul beyond recognition if it means controlling the odds of everything falling apart. He has no faith in anyone or anything, least of all the possibility of luck treating him kindly. The guy operates on a perfection meter because he’s convinced anything failing that means it’s over. See: how he reacted mid-act 2 when axons became the expedition’s only shot at success. He’s a creature of pure pessimism and despair. Letting himself trust in the possibility of a more ambitious outcome where more people survive isn’t something he’s capable of.

And it makes sense that he would feel that way. To verso, trust would seem like a cardinal sin. You can’t trust your family to make anything but horrific choices, you can’t trust your companions with knowing you or you’ll pay in blood. Trust is something that gets you burned to death in a house fire.

So between the two choices verso realistically could have seen, only one lets him save anyone at all. Everyone dies, slowly and horrifically, or everyone still dies with the exception of aline.

And the choice verso makes at the end of it all? Declining to participate in a second act of playing a god in denial, refusing to resurrect lumiere, is not the same as killing it. He knows how wretched it is to be the plaything of the dessendre family, why would he want to re-inflict that upon people who are no longer alive to suffer?

So. Those are my thoughts on that.

Edit: this is fully a case of closing the stable door after the horse has already bolted but. This was a scream into the void type post where i yell at a flaw i saw in the logic of a lot of video essays and broad consensus on reddit. I took the expectation of thoroughness and analysis i would give to a public-facing video with thousands of views and blanket applied that to anyone who happens to read this. I thought that would top out at maybe 20 people so didnt put much thought into it. I aimed this take at an opinion and forgot to consider the individual reader.

The frustration i felt absolutely reads like condescension. This wasn’t me looking the reader in the eyes and asking how the player could miss something simple (because it isn’t simple!), it was more wondering if i’m actually losing it or if almost every analysis i was seeing of a story i care a lot about was presented on a partially inaccurate premise. Less “how did you miss this,” more “how did EVERYONE miss this.” But these two things read the same way. So now that the post has already escaped containment (💀) i decided to go back and soften the tone of the entire thing. There are probably gonna be multiple versions of this floating around now, but better late than never.